An Industrial Elegy

Philip Larkin concluded one of his bittersweet lyrics with the words: “It is intensely sad.” He was referring to money. But for a century of European and English novelists, beginning with Balzac, money, however sad in the end, possessed a mercurial, life enhancing power. It might prove the ruin of poor Pere Goriot and his greedy daughters or run like a corrosive venom in the veins of Cousine Bette, but money also provided the strong and throbbing pulse of the milieu in which they worked out their sordid destinies. Money can be as abstract as a financier’s daydreams or as tangible as a beggar’s nickel; for these authors, it represented a kind of greasy poetry, enabling them to ring the changes at every level of society.